Organizational scaling: The role of knowledge spillovers in driving multinational enterprise persistent rapid growth

Based on insights from the spillover, international business, and knowledge management literatures, we study factors that enhance multinational enterprise (MNE) scaling and growth. Viewing MNEs and their employees as potentially rich knowledge sources, we draw attention to MNE-to-MNE knowledge spillover which fuel MNE scaling throughout organizations and employ panel data spanning 44,256 foreign and 21,246 domestic MNEs during 2004-2017. Our results show that (a) foreign MNEs benefit from depth and breadth of organizational knowledge spillover available in a geographic region, (b) domestic MNEs benefit from the depth of human capital knowledge spillover, and surprisingly, (c) domestic ownership hampers MNE scaling.